Dragon Age: Inquisition - Gaider, Laidlaw and Prinze talk for hours in a room

On December 4, David Gaider, Mike Laidlaw and Freddie Prinze Jr. gave a talk at the NYU Game Center about the development of DA:I. The entire talk is temporarily hosted online here. It's two hours long, but if you want to plunge into it, know that the host runs his mouth for ten minutes before letting the guest speakers talk at all. You may want to jump to 12:30 or so, when Laidlaw begins:

Nothing is certain—that's a big part of the DA world. A lot of things are tied to faith and [the idea] that history is mutable. These are things that Dave [Gaider] set up really early. In the first DA game, the very first line ever spoken is "The Chantry teaches us that…" and it goes from there. That's one of the key watchwords: history is not necessarily true. We don't have a source telling us it how it all went down—you always have the idea of perspective […]

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And Laidlaw says that what some have called an MMO-style grind is inspired not by online games but by a very old-school favorite.

Laidlaw highlighted the team’s goal of allowing “activity-based gameplay” [hideous suit-ish phrase] in which players can progress towards large goals through a variety of different means. Whether a player wants to fight a dragon or improve their home base, they will be rewarded with things like Power and Influence…

As a model, Laidlaw pointed to Sid Meier’s Pirates! [in which anything] from sailing to sword-fighting to dancing with a governor’s daughter all help to further your overall goals as a pirate.

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More information.

What was there to talk about for hours?

This is how they developed the game:

Q: shall we handplace mobs so a player has a feeling what's too hard and return later to have a satisfaction of finally winning the hard mob or we'll repopulate areas with trashmobs every ingame second?
A: who cares for players' feelings, endless mobrespawns are cheap and fast to implement and everyone loves grinding.

Q2: shall we handplace items in all chests?
A2: you crazy? imagine the time we'd spend on that. let them exploit it, everyone loves cheating.

Q3: good, the game is postponed, shallwe improve PC controls and add stronghold specializations since we promised but cut them out?
A3: PC controls? cut out content? Peh! we add multiplayer, everyone loves multiplayer microtransactions!

Holy Spoiler-alert.

C'mon, don't post spoilers like that on the front page.

oh geez, sorry! I'm the worst about that. I've cut the post.